At the end of this most difficult and trying production year on the farm, when everything we tried ended being disappointing came a welcome surprise. We were asked to participate as a farm and family in the 40th edition of Farm Aid, the ongoing concert series started by Willie Nelson and others in response to the financial hardship of the mid eighties. It was to be in Minnesota at the stadium on the campus of the University of Minnesota. Additional to all the chances to represent our farm and family and what we were trying to do, I was to have a chance to meet Sarah Smarsh, that blaze of clear thinking and passionate writing out of rural Kansas.
I did, and it was far too short, of course, and an experience I will not soon forget. I write too, as you can see and I am rural, and like she, I am sick of being misrepresented as a cute comical character who knows nothing and lives in the past. We hit it off even though she is a generation or two younger than I (most people are anymore!)
The day was a press event and then an extended three hour marathon of press interviews after which I and a friend descended into a deafening rock concert going on a few floors below. I was ushered to the farmer's lounge and there spent some time talking to several young people who were excited about their efforts to connect farmers with customers. Unbeknownst to me, wife LeeAnn was getting a little annoyed with her inability to connect with me after what she understood was to be just a half hour with the press-I had turned my phone off. She got through and sent a grandson-we had much family and several good friends with us that day-to find me and fetch me down to the seats below.
The music was good, but the sound level intense. I am not much of a concert guy but this impressed me more than once. Old rockers with a message, names like Neil Young, Dave Matthews, John Mellenkamp as well as Willie Nelson of course and Margo Price-not so old-singing with a point, songs that I liked. I had Young's driving chorus "We've got crime in the White House" playing in my head for the next several days.
Son Josh and daughterinlaw Cindy had gotten seats on the main floor where the seats we had purchased were and found us in the farmer's lounge to say that Greg Gunthorp, with whom I had shared a podium thirty years earlier in Indiana talking about pastured hog production, was seated close to them and wanted to talk to me. I spent an hour on the main floor of the concert trying to talk to him and lost my voice for the next several days.
I am really not much of a concert guy but this was exceptional and I keep replaying the experience in my mind. It is so at least in part because it is rare for a farmer to find himself (or herself-three of the four presenters at the press event were women farmers)held up for admiration. I will carry the boost with me for when times are tough, as they pretty certainly will be.
